D&D Curse of Strahd - Castle Ravenloft

[Gumyr]

Gumyr here,

I've been DMing the excellent D&D 5e adventure Curse of Strahd for about a year and a half now (our group likes to take our time) and we're about to get to the climax, Castle Ravenloft, the home of Strahd von Zarovich. The adventure comes with battlemaps for all of the other encounters but Ravenloft is presented as an isometric projection, which is nice but not suitable for how we play. When DMing I use an old 32" LCD TV laid flat that I've modified by adding a sheet of protective acrylic on top of the LCD as a "tabletop" and drive the TV with a laptop running GIMP. This allows me to create maps of any size which is very handy in the case of Ravenloft as the first map is huge - 135"x80" - and would require a very large sheet of paper.

Here are a couple previews of the maps:
Ravenloft_Castle_Sample.jpgRavenloft_Study.jpg

If you plan to play this adventure be advised that these maps contain spoilers. If you're a DM like me, I hope you find them useful. Here are eleven Ravenloft maps (numbered map 2 to 12 for some reason?):

• Map 2 Walls of Ravenloft.png
• Map 3 Main Floor.png
• Map 4 Court of the Count.png
• Map 5 Rooms of Weeping.png
• Map 6 Spires of Ravenloft.png
• Map 7 Spires of Ravenloft.png
• Map 8 Spires of Ravenloft.png
• Map 9 North Tower Peak.png
• Map 10 High Tower Peak.png
• Map 11 Larders of Ill Omen.png
• Map 12 Dungeon and Catacombs.png

I've made a few minor (I hope) deviations from the written text in the adventure:

• Map 2: I've added swinging steel gates to the portcullis' to make them visible from above. Strahd's carriage is outside of the carriage house to show it off. A stockade is present close to the main entrance.
• Map 3: The original isometric projection seems to take some liberty with spacial reality so there are some minor changes in structures within the castle.
• Map 11 & 12: Again, the original isometric projection doesn't fit perfectly so the sizes of some of the chambers are a little larger than in the descriptive text.

When we play I use a "fog of war" as a GIMP layer on top of the map and slowly reveal the map as the players explore. This "fog of war" hides secret rooms until the players find them in the game. Additional GIMP layers contain traps and secret doors that can be separately enabled as the players discover these items (intentionally or not) in the game. I could share these as well but other virtual table-top systems probably already include these features.

Let me know what you think of the maps, or if you end up using them in your game, how it went.

Cheers,
Gumyr